Take & Read: Old Testament

The way we translate and interpret the Bible is always shaped by both textual and contextual factors. The rise of cultural hermeneutics within the field of biblical studies has challenged scholars to acknowledge and interrogate the cultural contexts of the texts, their interpreters, and their readers and to place these multiple contexts in conversation.

My social location as an African American Christian woman is always with me—sitting down beside me, reading over my shoulder—when I open the Bible. I usually come to the text with two questions: Where are the women, and where is Africa? I pose similar questions to biblical scholarship: Where are the voices of women biblical scholars and of African biblical scholars? Four of these voices stand out among recent publications in the field.

African biblical exegesis almost always aims to be accessible and useful to contemporary readers. In African Hermeneutics (Langham Global Library), Elizabeth Mburu observes that African readers of the Bible “face the additional challenge that most of the models and methods of bible interpretation, or hermeneutics, are rooted in a Western context.” She attributes this to the importation of modern Christianity to the African continent through Western missionaries. African Hermeneutics is Mburu’s attempt to fill this void by offering a “contextualized, African intercultural approach” to studying the Bible.